


Third Lesson

by peacocktails



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
Genre: Childhood Trauma, F/M, Gen, Lanai - Freeform, Master & Padawan Relationship(s), Psychological Horror, Space Politics, Teacher-Student Relationship, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-02-01
Packaged: 2019-03-08 12:50:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13458627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peacocktails/pseuds/peacocktails
Summary: The Sith punish. Jedi training is punishing.(Only unresolved sexual tension; a song you might like for this is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GtDys37TUo - Mercedes Lackey - 'Fundamentals'.)





	1. Gift

She'd been wary to ask him about the day's training - and when they'd start - when she'd gotten up before dawn that morning. But now that they had their porridge of galla seeds and sirenmilk (she'd forced it down), it seemed as if he was going to make nothing happen unless she took initiative. "Master Skywalker?"  
  
"Hm?"  
  
"My third lesson?"  
  
"Ah." He downed the last of the herb tea she'd found undrinkable. "Right. So," he said, putting the clay teacup into his empty bowl, "tell me how you occupied yourself, day in and day out, on Jakku."  
  
"Well, I was a scavenger," she began, and - immediately realising that it had come out as if she suspected he'd forgotten her telling him more or less everything she'd thought he needed to know - said, "erm - I assume you mean -"  
  
"Yes, yes - what did you _do_? In the business of scavenging? If you woke up, here, before you met the, er, orange artoo unit, what would you look for?"  
  
"I've thought about that." Her eyes moved up and around. "There's nothing here that I know would be valuable to foreign traders. Maybe a naturalist somewhere would want the porgs. ... But, besides that -" she straightened up like a tentative flower " - your X-Wing?"  
  
"Right," nodded Luke, head lowered. "No; I'm afraid that's out of the question. ..Apologies."  
  
"A shame," she said. "Even if it's waterlogged, the panels could still be melted down."  
  
"Mm hmm," he nodded with patient interest as Rey continued the list of useful raw materials extractable from the craft's facade or interior. "Impressive," he said, when she finished. It wasn't going to happen, though, of course.  
  
"Er," she paused. "There's a kind of fertiliser in the walls outside. The Lanai would find that useful."  
  
"And where is that?" he asked. "You'll have to forgive my technical ignorance: besides this, the only thing I really know how to do is farm moisture."    
  
Rey, standing up, tipped her staff up to catch it vertical in her hand, and gave him an incredulous look.  
  
"Well, a bit of sharpshooting here and there." He shrugged.  
  
She slid the staff along the floor until it tapped a point between floor and wall an arm-length behind Luke and directly below a porg-sized square window in the hut. "Here it is," she said, as Luke turned and bent down to examine it.  
  
"That," said Luke, leaning back on his good hand with the other on his lap, as he craned up to the ceiling to spot more of it. "Yes, I usually just get rid of that myself."  
  
"There's probably lots and lots of it on the older stone structures," said Rey. Her eyes brightened. "I wonder if the Lanai know it's here?"  
  
"Hmm.." said Luke, inscrutably. "They wouldn't take it, if they did. ..I told them two years ago not to touch anything on the structures in a half-mile radius around the Tree. Or that I live in."  
  
"Right." How.. eccentric? Blinking at him, she masked a frown - it seemed an arbitrary, cruel demand to make of a people who called themselves the Caretakers. "Anyway. Those are the only things I can think of worth scavenging here."  
  
"I see. Hmm. Well -" Luke reached forward to take Rey's empty bowl and stack it onto his own - "let's suppose you had an epiphany, today. I don't know how you did, but let's say you did. .. Let's say that you realised that, likely as not, the best thing you can possibly do for the Resistance is to spend the rest of today scraping porg droppings off these walls." His blue eyes bored into her. "How would you feel about that?"  
  
Could it be.. could it be that he enjoyed mocking her? The hairs on the back of her neck rose. "What about tomorrow?"  
  
"That doesn't really answer the question, but I'll let it go." Luke nodded. "Let's say that you realise that tomorrow, too, you have to go somewhere. Not back to Jakku;  I grant you've had enough of that place for one lifetime. Maybe Geonosis, or Canto Bight. Because you've realised that, if ever you want the Resistance to defeat the First Order, you're probably going to have to spend the rest of your days just.. keeping to yourself; surviving and trading: in short, living the way you've always done."  
  
She had always hated hypothetical questions, but she'd rise to it. "I would do anything to see the First Order defeated."  
  
"Yes, I thought so," Luke said. " That's good, and I certainly admire that. ... But I didn't say that you knew _for certain_ that going back to the life you know is the best way that you can help bring about the defeat of the First Order." He touched his beard, mulling his thought. "Let's say that that's only what you've been _told_ \- by everyone you trust; all your life. And you can't see any way to either verify or disprove it." He stroked his beard. "What then?"  
  
The answer, of course, was that he was describing the situation of every dogsbody and Outer Rim private in the Resistance, and that she felt as if she wanted to cry, and that it was his fault. But she mustn't say that, she told herself: she could have hope in him; she just had to try.  
  
Other words wouldn't come, though.  
  
"You don't really want to do it anymore, do you?" he said, in a voice suddenly hard and quiet. "You never really wanted to do it."  
  
She glanced up at the ceiling, and, after an irritated pause, subtly shook her head. Would he change, now? Would he pick up his lightsaber again - the gesture of care and grace she'd imagined so many times after meeting Kanata - and tell her that she'd passed all his tests?  
  
"So." His hands patted his crossed knees. "The good news is that you don't have to do any of that stuff any more. What you're going to do, just for now, is teach _me_ to do it."  
  
She repressed a sigh. "Then we can give it to the Lanai as a gift?"  
  
"Then we can give it to the Lanai, yes."  
  
She could tell, somehow, that he wasn't mocking her, but there was something that hurt - tweaked her pride - about this sudden ostensible enthusiasm for collecting porg excreta. "I don't suppose you've got the necessary tools.."  
  
"Ah -" he held up a finger for pause - "but here, now!" He stretched his back and neck, and then, to Rey's surprise, exited with a sudden agility, washing-up in hand. There was the sound of unlocking, some steps away, a rummaging, re-locking, and then he reappeared with a bucket by its handle over his arm, a sharpish rock in one hand, and a Lanai-make dustpan and brush in the other. "Will these do?"  
  
"Mhm," nodded Rey, and followed him back outside, and then into one of the Lanai-forbidden huts where the walls weren't so clean. But then, she supposed, as bright-eyed and bushy-bearded he laid the bucket down by the wall, it wouldn't be _about_ actually getting fertiliser. It'd be something else that had grabbed him as opportune to have her experience. He picked up the rock, and chiseled a few specks of guano into the bucket. "Like this?"  
  
"That's right."  
  
A surreal notion: to be standing, nineteen years old, on a water-sprayed world, supervising Luke Skywalker to perform menial labour.  
  
"I don't suppose it gets any more complicated than that?"  
  
"Well, yes, it's, er .. very technical work.." As her words trailed away as she watched him, Rey saw herself, in her mind's eye, ten years old and small enough to get into the steelpecker-roost cave systems. She was on her hands and knees - as Luke now was, on the stone floor - pulling detritus into buckets in the light of a small sliver of midday sun. She hadn't known what the stuff was useful for, then; only that the traders told her to get it.  
  
Then she found herself in the doorway, squeezing her upper arm and staring down at his back. "Doesn't that hurt your knees?"  
  
He laughed up from the floor, but not unkindly. "Well, that's a backhanded gesture if I ever heard one."  
  
"I say it because the stones would hurt mine, too."  
  
"That's right. ... And you don't have to help out, by the way," he said, when she bent down outside the doorway to find another pick-rock. "Come back in." The reawakened child resented any instruction, but Rey complied. "Sit down, if you like." She didn't. "Or don't sit down, that's fine too."  
"But, now.. breathe, again, firstly." She closed her eyes. "Don't close your eyes."  
  
"Alright, then," he said, scraping up dried guano with his bad hand and dropping it into the bucket, "let's just hold that breathing for a little while."  
  
There was only frustration - it would be so much easier if she could just look at nothing, or even just at the sea or sky or rocks.  
  
"When you were doing this kind of thing - on Jakku, against your will, as a child -" he gesticulated with the brush in hand, from a kneel - "what was it that the people around you did?" he said, with what seemed to be a curious interest - it sounded sincere, but why should he should be interested in such lowly, shameful things?  
  
"Sometimes I had helpers." She smiled, when he looked up at her. "But the traders usually just watched things on holoreaders. One man watched me to make sure I wouldn't take something to sell to someone else. Or they would read. Unclean things, sometimes."  
  
"We've got those ancient Jedi texts, as you know, but - hmm - 'unclean'. Well, that really depends," he said, over the soft scrapes of the brush. "No, you might as well just keep breathing."  
  
Ten minutes passed (or, what felt like it). "I haven't felt at all what I felt on the rock," she said, "when my eyes were closed."  
  
He nodded. "What else did those adults on Jakku do?"  
  
"They relaxed."  
  
"Do that."  
  
"What - ah?" she balked. "I can't just relax on command!"  
  
Nonchalantly he snapped a slate rock in half in his hand, and slowed his pace on the already half-cleared wall. "Then, I want you to imagine that you, yourself, are one of the people who hurt you. Any one."  
  
There was once a time when she'd been watched doing this on the outskirts of a cave by a man sitting above her on the porch of a caravan. She'd forgotten his face, but she knew that his beard was thick and brown and his skin weathered and tanned.  
  
"Try to gradually move to the _other side_ \- the other half." That curious tone of voice Luke had taken on the rock.  
  
What clothes did he wear, again? All he could afford: a tunic - loose, made for some nonhuman species. Too big, almost like a child wearing its parent's clothes. A feeling of some vague force was coming upon her, such that, if she closed her eyes, she'd see the man just as he had been.  
  
"Again - don't close your eyes." Frustration.  
  
Suddenly something took shape out of the vague force - shapes, blobs, in her mind's eye - but then she opened her eyes, and now they weren't shapes, they were feelings: hurt, fear .. avoidance.  
  
They weren't her own.  
  
As she realised this, a blackness seemed to fall over her open eyes - or perhaps she'd just forgotten what she was looking at - for several seconds. But then .. there was something coming from outside.. words:  
  
_I was there. I.. hurt, fear, avoidance .. me._  
  
_You're me._  
  
_Me, too._  
  
Someone running. Footfalls on the sand, and grain stolen from the storage bin behind the hold.

You _you_ did it.

She hadn't done that! It wasn't her!  
  
_Get out of it!_  
  
_Get out_ \- brown hair, yelling - not me - not you -  
  
\- didn't deserve to be punished for something .. didn't commit -

 _Leave_  
  
your _my_  
  
_mind_  
  
He'd thrown the glass grain jar thrown on the floor - breaking -  
  
"This isn't right," her small hard voice broke back through, and the glazed film of Jakku lifted from her eyes.  
  
Luke didn't reply. "..You're mistaken about this, somehow," she continued.  
  
Silent, he was only - infuriating, wretched - on his knees on the floor, scraping porg shit - brown hair in the beard - clothes, loose -

 _I don't ever want to become like you._  
  
Knocked back onto the desert ground, the sun's glare in the aquamarine sky, and the hissing heat - " _No_. You're just a kid. You'll learn that I'm right when I tell you that life's not fair."  
  
A voice she'd never heard before: not of Jakku, nor of Tatooine, but it was _here,_ in the room - horrifying - sharp, clear. And now it wasn't a man; it was a shape, in the room, over the room - over Jakku. A horrible shape - but she could get rid of it, if she just .. stopped looking..  
  
"I'm mistaken. I must be doing something wrong." Her voice felt so faint and distant; as if her ears were filled with water.  
  
"Rey, it doesn't matter if you believe it or not." It was Luke's voice, with urgent force. "Just keep looking at it!"  
  
(I'm) _afraid - aren't you?_ A desperate girl-child's voice in a man's sneer.  
  
_Don't (let me) make (these) mistakes next time!._ The image of a rope tied around her waist - his waist - once when she'd actually tried to steal something from the back room - after he'd given her the idea. Pulling each other.  
  
She wondered if she had cried out - strangled sound - just now, in front of Master Luke - was that her imagination -  
  
_Next time. You'll be here, won't you? If you want to live._ She stopped pulling. The rope disappeared.  
  
She saw a little toy woven finger-trap she'd found on the ground when she was five years old and kept until it fell apart. She'd played with it in the AT-AT when there was nothing good to think about. "I hate you." Trying to pull her fingers apart.  
  
_If you want to live._ "I wish you had.. I wish I'd never been born."  
  
"I wish you I were dead. ... ... I want to see you.. I.. dead."  
  
"All in good time, Rey," and with the patient warmth in Luke's voice Rey realised like leaving hyperspace that she had been speaking aloud, that her eyes were still open, and that she was still looking down at him on the floor. "Everything in its time, now.."  
  
A wave of nauseous shame and embarrassment fanned toward her. She waited for input from him; some kind of direction, and she wouldn't be resentful, any more - of course she was a helpless child, dependent on him to overcome and escape this horrible cycle; of course the Light side and the Dark side of the Force were both vanity and fool's games, so...  
  
No instruction came.  
  
She kept thinking as the terrible wave approached - it was never possible for _him_ tied to her in his caravan to escape; the Force wasn't strong with him; that was a shame, but that's life, and - why was he not instructing her - she needed - it wasn't fair, why wasn't he -  
  
She felt herself drop down onto the floor beside him, sitting cross-legged.  
  
"Do you happen to feel any compassion for him, right now?" Luke asked her dispassionately, but she didn't see his face.  
  
"Yes," she said - maybe he'd stop the nauseous wave if she did - and immediately regretted it. _You're lying_ , said the caravan-man. _You're not a kid any more. Stop kidding yourself. Have some compassion._  
  
Master Skywalker didn't reply, but only crouched back on his knees, winced, and rubbed his apparently aching back.  
  
At the sight of his displeasure at the task - at her performance; at her lie? - she felt herself crawling forward to put her hand on the bucket and take over the work. She relaxed, felt the wave dissolve, as a thought entered her mind: _the most you're good for._ She moved closer to the wall, so that she'd be working next to him.  
  
But now he turned, close so that she could see thin lines of blood on the whites of his eyes, and he was brandishing the shit-stained brush in a shaking grip. "Rey," he said, "as your Jedi Master, I forbid you from continuing to do anything half-heartedly."

A pause - before she cut eye contact, and, like an animal, backed away.  
  
"You can do anything else that you like," he said, releasing her.  
  
Rey stood up, shakily. "When I told you that I felt compassion.." she said, closing her eyes.  
  
"You were lying?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"That's alright," he said, dispassionately. "Don't worry about it."  
  
"I might go for a walk."  
  
"To the Tree?"  
  
He didn't trust her alone with either the books or the tree; she already knew this. He'd let her read them if she asked; but then, of course, she'd have to ask, and she didn't want - she didn't deserve to do that. "No. Not that cave, either."  
  
"That's perfectly fine."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I hope no-one with a linguistics degree reads this

"Ida kara rebegzz quh Master?"  
  
"Aren't you listening to your Master?"  
  
"So feuru, feuru sato - off siiga?"  
  
"Why aren't you off doing something important?"  
  
"Would you tell them that I didn't mean to disturb anyone?"  
  
Curt nodding. Her self-appointed interpreter in his colourful woolen shawl turned to the white-habited group working at their little rickety wringer and washboards, around an old stone well. "Se tah, seh... Rey omesk on upset. Iton. Seru?"  
  
Four pairs of eyes glowered up at her from the wellside. Then the Lanai woman with a yellow brooch, who was apparently the most senior of the four, took the pulley, and with exquisite care and aggression drew the bucket back up from the well. "Ay," she said.  
  
"Alcida says," said Freve, "that it's OK that you destroyed our wheelbarrow and made a hole in our wall and disturbed our routine by visiting us just now, because you.. nehhh.." he shuffled a footclaw "..don't know what you're doing.."  
  
Rey blinked at Alcida, and at Freve. "She said all that?"  
  
"Somesk seru fuve, a quh, es, rez so daska somez well. Daily, grebors saival, so te Rey misuzae esk," Alcida gesticulated.  
  
"Yes," said Freve, who, disconcertingly, had taken off his cap and was holding it in front of his chest.  
  
Rey showed Alcida a warm, if confused, smile. It had seemed reasonable enough to pay an unannounced visit just to apologise to the villagers and to learn more about them - perhaps over a game of cards later on, she'd offered - but, if that was not their way, then that was not their way.  (That, or there was more of a language barrier in force than Freve was game to let on.)  
  
But now one of the four - the bespectacled woman furthest from Alcida - was stepping out towards Rey with gentle, open hands, and - returning a compassionate smile? "Vaska Rey ki'ens," she said. "Ruat-wheel so ti ah meska sii, iton ak fan. Meru."  
  
"Ehh.." said Freve, "Neuva says you -" he ignored Alcida's frown at him  "- ought to come with her to repair the wheelbarrow."  
  
"Vaskalei tey, job!" Alcida said at Neuva.  
  
"That is _her_ job," said Freve, side-eyeing Neuva. "Not yours."  
  
Rey looked to Neuva - as did the silent huddled two beside Alcida. If she was honest with herself, she thought, she had really only come to the Lanai to distract herself from the things she had seen (and said) in the hut that morning (and wondered if that constituted breaking Luke's command). Shamefully, she wondered if the upset she was causing was somehow her punishment for doing so.  
  
"Mez fara so, mi'te aron vitu," muttered Neuva beneath her spectacles, her hands in her habit pockets, "vitu Luke Skywalker istrak."  
  
"Neuva says you ought to do it for her, because she's.. old and grumpy.." Freve lowered his scaly eyebrows. "Or something like that."  
  
Alcida threw a scandalised hand up behind her back. "Gedans, ikoi!"  
  
"I don't really want to translate that," said Freve.  
  
Neuva shook her head and shrugged, before promptly turning and wandering away. The other women watched her for a while - Alcida had returned to her washing - before Freve murmured up at Rey, with a muddled, placatory expression. "Maybe you should go."  
  
Rey, nodding to him and Alcida, ran off towards Neuva, who was weaving her way down into the rocky valley below the higher cliffs.  
  
"Not with -" Freve reached out - but Rey was already out of earshot. "Ahhh.." He caught his words in his balled fist and bit his lip, as Alcida glared at him.  
  
  
It was slightly disconcerting that the Lanai knew enough about Rey already to know that, if shown the materials, she'd be able to fix the barrow without further instruction. Or was it just Neuva? Rey spit the screw she was holding in her mouth out into her hand, and then wiggled it into place. She glanced at Neuva out of the corner of her eye as she wound the screwdriver. The tiny woman was relaxing in front of a tiny fire in the fish-oven, on a too-big wooden chair with a porgskin blanket and a stool for her footclaws. And she was reading - a surprise, that she could read - an old holocronographed copy of some text that was clearly Jedi and probably sacred.  
  
"Can you.." said Rey, and Neuva cocked her head. "Can you use the Force?" She hoped the question was not impertinent. (The last several months, actually, had been nothing if not a lesson in the fact that not everything meant what it meant on Jakku.)  
  
Neuva considered this for a second. She took the paper in one hand, and with her other, mimed with stubby oustretched fingers at making the paper shiver and rise. "Ih?" she confirmed, and Rey nodded. Then Neuva shook her head with no small measure of wistfulness, and promptly went back to reading her text.  
  
The job had already been around half-done when Rey started, and it was the work of a few hours to complete. The recovered barrow would never be as sturdy as the original: when they wheeled it out of Neuva's stone cottage, it moved at a visibly slower pace, giving out awkward squeaks every few metres - nonetheless, Neuva smiled and nodded to the effect that it was fit for purpose. Before they left to return it to the village, Neuva loaded it with the remainder of the cut timber, the leather bag of nails and screws, and the tools.  
  
A surprisingly heavy load it was, too: Rey leaned both hands forward on the handles to push the barrow back up through the valley, as Neuva followed at a brisk half-jog alongside. Over a particularly rough and uneven knoll the wheels wouldn't pass, and Rey was surprised by Neuva's strength as she helped her lift the barrow over it. As they turned their eyes towards the village and away from the cliffs, the sinking sun glinted into Rey's eyes.  
  
She squinted and turned her eyes down to the grass, continuing to push the barrow uphill with both hands until she'd reached less steep land. When she shielded her eyes with her free hand, she noticed that Neuva had been walking on ahead - actually, she must have run: Rey spotted her near the other women by the cooking fires outside the long row of huts. Some were busy scaling, gutting, or roasting fingerlip garpon, others tended the iron pots in which bubbled a certain kind of root (that Luke, she remembered him telling her, had learnt the hard way was poisonous to humans.) A steady trickle of fishermen with wicker packs of catch strapped to their backs emerged up from the spiraling route down to the sea; those already arrived relaxed around the mens' longhouse, or idly occupied their younger children as their wives and older daughters cooked.  
  
Entering the village proper, Rey saw Neuva now by the well, and the crumbling-stone-walled laundry from which all but one seaweed-fibre basket had already been taken away. She'd begun feeding a sheet through the wooden drying wringer, and then, hurriedly, a waistcoat, a habit, and a tunic. Finishing with a full basket of clothes still slightly damp, she then began a brisk trot back towards one of the huts - her house?  
  
Rey, wondering where it would be appropriate to leave the wheelbarrow, glanced around for Alcida or Freve. She didn't see them, noticing instead a man approaching Neuva, his pack of fish still on his back. Neuva seemed to turn away from him as he began talking, and then Rey saw him tip his head and gesture towards her and the wheelbarrow. Rey stopped, trying to catch Neuva's eye - but she didn't look back. She pushed the laundry basket behind her back with her footclaws -  
  
\- and the man struck Neuva across her head with the back of his fist.  
  
Rey gasped. Her eyes darted to the other women. They hadn't looked up.  
  
He continued to hit Neuva, and hit her again.  
  
"STOP IT!"  
  
He showed no recognition of having heard Rey's shout, as Neuva crumpled to her knees, shielding her head with her hands, and, in prosaic indifference real or affected, the women continued to cook.  
  
Rey ran, and suddenly one of the younger women was stepping out into her path, and as Rey was skidding on gravel to avoid the collision she noticed out of the corner of her eye - behind the woman half her height, staring up venomously - a tall rock behind and to the west of the huts. Then as the gravel crunched a horrifying _crack_ sounded, and the woman wheeled around to reveal, in the distance behind her, a child playing with a toy cart on a string by the rock, as fragments of slate sprayed up from beneath, and he was knocked underneath the jaw and splayed out on his back with a scream.  
  
Rey stood, hair and end and muscles taut. A strangled, squeak-like cry from her erstwhile assailant: she ran gibbering off to the boy, grabbing his collar and checking his pulse. The batterer let go of his fist-grip on Neuva's white dress collar - she brought a hand up to her bruised face - and made off towards the rock, too.  
  
The younger woman checked the boy's pulse again. "Oh, please, no," murmured Rey, and began to run towards the rock - but she was pulled roughly back, this time, by three white-sleeved green hands on the hem of her tunic. They'd appeared behind her, at some point, and now they were babbling furiously at her, voices flowing together into a stream of spite.  
  
"Zotezka! So soromesk!"  
  
From the men's quarters came a curse, and the sound of running footclaws - Freve. On tiptoes, Freve strained to poke his head above the ring of verbal assailants around Rey. For a second Rey's heart lightened, but then - "They're saying that this our _way_ ," he translated, frowning.  
  
"Karos stez rebz?!"  
  
"'Aren't you going to respect our way?'"  
  
"Si tu siiga! O tey ai, su siiga!"  
  
"'Can't you understand that we do things for our own reasons?'"  
  
"Staoss!"  
  
"You should leave."  
  
In the distance Rey saw the injured boy lift himself up in his mother's arms with ease, and shake his head. A reed-thin stream of blood was running from his neck.  
  
Suddenly as if by magnetic repulsion the tugging hands came free of Rey's clothes. She ran: not away, or to the boy, but to Neuva, and dropped to her knees beside her. She took hold of her, ran her hands over her facial bruises, verified that her glasses were unbroken. And then, as Rey began checking for broken limbs, she stopped - behind her back she heard a swift hiss of metal on leather. Turning to find Neuva's husband flying at her with a plunging fishknife, she ducked almost flat to the ground - he lost balance, stumbling forward and almost falling, as Rey turned to guard Neuva.  
  
The little man stalked towards them, and hissed, in mangled Basic. "Away, you gaet." He pointed the knife towards Luke's distant hut.  
  
"You won't hurt her any more," Rey stated, panting. "Master Skywalker will be here soon."  
  
He just stood there, turning the knife-handle in his fingers. _Would he be?_ "..Do you understand?" she breathed, showing him the straight-backed posture she'd learned could sometimes get you out of fights.  
  
A second passed - and then Rey suddenly felt her heart sink, as the man's shoulders began to heave: subtly, at first, and then forcefully as through his nostrils he expelled a queer, buzzing _laugh_.  
  
"What are you laughing at?!" Luke wouldn't just condone things like this, if she made him see it. He wouldn't.  
  
Gradually his wheezing stopped, and he spoke again. "..It matter no." He wiped one bulbous eye with a finger. "Gaet away, girur."  
  
She didn't move.  
  
He raised both eyebrows slowly. Then he pointed behind his shoulder. Rey turned to find that the cold eyes of three women - only two she recognised - and a man with an ornate necklace, whom she didn't recognise, had been bearing down on her back, as they stood, two paces behind her, fish-knives brandished.  
  
Rey bit her tongue and squeezed her eyes almost-shut - remember the Battle of Endor; remember Anakin Skywalker - before turning to Neuva with a questioning grimace. "Are you going to be alright just for now?"  
  
She nodded.  
  
\--  
  
  
"Master Skywalker?" There was no response. Five buckets of guano were full, but the huts were all empty. "Master Luke??" The washing up had all been put away, too. She cupped her hands around her mouth to amplify sound. "Luke?!"  
  
Only a porg called back at her. She allowed herself a forceful sigh, before hauling up the buckets onto her elbows and into her hands.  
  
As fast as she could run without losing anything, Rey reached the outskirts of the village in ten minutes. Neuva was nowhere to be seen. Nor was her husband.  
  
But Alcida had returned, standing next to shrewd Freve, who had apparently recognised the sound of Rey's footsteps from several dozen paces away. They steeled themselves at her approach, but soon Freve's tenseness, at least, softened into a quizzical frown when Rey was close enough for him to spot the contents of the buckets.  
  
Rey looked away, glancing around for the injured boy and his mother. The streak of his blood on the rock was still there, but perhaps the mother had gone back inside to clean him. The women in general, in fact, seemed to be in the process of retiring indoors: their fires had been put out, though the coals still glowed in the cool, darkening evening light. Outside the men's longhouse, the fishermen, fletchers, and thatchers were still picking the bones of the roasted garpon.  
  
Boots softly crunching to a stop on the gravel, she greeted the eminent two. "Hello."  
  
"Ikh," said Alcida.  
  
"She says, 'hello'," said Freve.  
  
"Do you know where I can find the woman whose child got hit by the rock?" Rey asked tersely. "And where I can find Neuva and her husband?" She laid one of the buckets on the ground so that the shorter Alcida could see the contents. "I only come so I can apologise to them and make sure they're alright. And give them this."  
  
Rey couldn't pinpoint what exactly in her face had changed, but Alcida seemed surprised, or maybe even - bizarrely - shocked, by the gift. She looked down at the bucket for some time before turning her large watery eyes up onto Rey. "Karika dazei. Omsiig or vu, ah ti aro meska s'ton," she stated in her usual iron cadence.  
  
Freve didn't translate this - instead, turning to Alcida, he began to make some kind of appeal to her, in a low, cryptic voice. Alcida replied, again with firm finality. But Freve continued to press her with plaintive tones and rhetorical hand gestures, and her eyes rolled over the evening sky as she considered. Finally, she nodded.  
  
"Listen," said Freve. "You can't give that as a gift to Neuva or Seran." Rey opened her mouth to protest, but Alcida silenced her with a raised hand. "The reason for it is that.." Freve continued, mulling his words, "..if the other men see what Seran has got ahold of, they -" he sighed, and cringed slightly - "they'll not respect her husband. You see, it's the way, on Ahch-To, that the husband is supposed to get things for the wife? The women - you see, tongues will talk, for her having more than them.."  
  
Rey was tempted to tell him that he was as wrong here as he would be on Jakku, but she forced herself to ignore him. "Where is Neuva? Is she _safe_?" she pressed.  
  
"Adi katheska," said Alcida.  
  
"We don't know where Neuva or her husband are," Freve sighed. "But.. it's good that you did this thing to say sorry. Everyone in the village can make use of this thing, you see; we can use it."  
  
"Right," said Rey. "That's good. But.." she took a deep breath "..I need Neuva and Seran to know that the only thing I'm sorry for is accidentally hurting Seran's child. I'm very much _not_ sorry for trying to stop Neuva's husband. So, could you please tell me where you think they both are?"  
  
Alcida seemed utterly bored by the whole thing - but Freve was listening keenly, nodding, and glancing from the buckets back to Rey. "Yes, yes," said Freve. "I'll talk to some people to try to find out where they are for you, now." Rey maintained a guarded facade: obviously, there was going to be some kind of catch. "I want to know, though," Freve began, "have you seen any yellow rocks anywhere?" His tone suddenly viscous, ingratiating. "Or know where we might find them?"  
  
And there the catch was. "Do you mean amber?" Rey replied. "Pyrite - you probably don't mean gold?"  
  
Freve's eyes darted as he seemed to scan his Basic vocabulary. "Ehhn.. I don't know your name for it," he said. "Wait." He ran off to a large-ish thatched-roof stone shed behind the men's quarters, and when he returned he opened his hands to reveal to Rey a piece of sulphur.  
  
"Ah," said Rey, uneasily. Sulphur was indeed another kind of fertiliser, but..  
  
"Ih, and another thing," Freve cut in. He opened his other hand, in which was hidden a stick of charcoal. "Do you know any trees that Luke Skywalker would allow us to burn?"  
  
Her innards chilled. _Nitrate for saltpetre. Black powder._  
  
"What do you need it for?" Rey queried with calculated nonchalance, glancing towards the shed.  
  
"..For defense," Freve admitted, with evasive hands in his tunic front pockets. "Against some other villages."  
  
A pregnant silence passed between them, below the burble of the male revelers at their stools and tables on the east side of the village square. They were drinking some kind of fermented beverage under the long wood-and-thatch veranda of the men's house.  
  
_Don't burn down trees. Don't clean the ancient temple huts._ Freve, Rey realised, had regarded them as eccentric, cruel instructions, too. But surely Luke wouldn't hurt the villagers to enforce them?  
  
"I don't know of any," she said. She'd lost practice at lying, on account of needing to be so honest about her life with Chewbecca; Kanata; Han Solo. "It comes in deposits, you see - you don't find it spread around."  
  
"Don't you?" said Freve, and Rey almost but not quite lost her composure, because as he spoke she saw the glint of the Force in his eyes.  
  
"No." She found her eyes reflecting it, whatever it was, back at him. "But I could ask Master Luke about the charcoal, the next time I see him?"  
  
"Hmmm..." mused Freve, stroking his snout - until Alcida, grabbing his hand away, pointed to something in the direction of Neuva's valley. "Aromeski!"  
  
Rey almost sighed for relief as she saw Luke coming up over the ridge - She gave him a small wave, instead, and noticed that Freve appeared to be mentally weighing up whether to run back to the shed (as Alcida glowered at him). He slipped the charcoal and sulphur into his front pockets in the gesture of putting his hands into them.  
  
As Luke approached, Alcida and Freve gave him a nodding bow. The other Lanai who weren't indoors or busy (except the children obliviously running or crawling on the grass) immediately followed suit.  
  
Luke glanced from the guano buckets to Freve's full pockets, and then met Rey's eyes. "You've haven't just stoked a civil war, have you?"  
  
"Master Skywalker, I - there's something going on - I need to explain -"  
  
Luke smiled and shook his head, before turning to Freve and Alcida. "Tsk, tsk, tsk - Freve, you're not going to make any kind of explosive with that fertiliser." Alcida seemed to be forcing herself to make eye contact with Luke; Freve's eyes were already pointed at the ground. "You and Alcida are going to see that it's distributed evenly over the village allotments."  
  
"Mekaros akscha," Alcida implored Luke in a quiet voice. "Quhteri."  
  
"Yes, even Neuva's garden," said Luke, as Freve habitually raked the gravel under his footclaws. "I'll be checking."  
  
"Have you been talking to Neuva?" said Rey, bright-eyed and urgent.  
  
"Not recently," said Luke. "Why, did someone beat her for reading on the job?" He ignored Freve's stare.  
  
"Her husband," Rey said quietly, and wondered whether her voice was in earshot of the increasingly scandalised small crowd of villagers around them who were pretending not to eavesdrop. "Will you talk to him about it? He'd listen to you."  
  
"No," Luke said flatly - Rey tensed - and then, out of the corner of his eye: "Where are your children, Freve? Playing with the Northern Villagers, again?" Freve's smirk soured, and with a nod to Alcida, he began to trudge away. Alcida, in turn, glanced to the fertiliser bucket, and then to Luke as if for permission. He nodded to the bucket, which she prompted lifted with strain.  
  
"Wait!" called Rey. "You still haven't told me where Neuva and Seran are."  
  
Freve stopped, and from over his shoulder raised heavy eyebrows at Rey, before glancing up at Luke. "Freve, stop it," said Luke. "You know I've never had a problem with anyone asking questions."  
  
Freve chewed his words for a second, before looking pointedly up at Rey. "...Then you shouldn't have a problem with anyone not answering them." He went on walking, and Alcida behind him lugged the bucket away in the direction of the vegetable gardens.  
  
Rey stepped forward - "You can't just -" and felt Luke's hand on her shoulder.  
  
"I can't just put you into something that Neuva herself wouldn't want you to get involved in?" called back Freve. "I can't just take this bucket to the rifle-house, instead of going to trouble over the gardens?" He laughed. " _Ah-hhn_. And you say you wanted to help us?"  
  
A hot vein of outrage - the same kind that smashed the rock - flooded Rey, now. "You _can't_ -" A vein to strike out and seize muscles; bones -  
  
Luke held her shoulder tighter. "That's the lesson." A whisper - firm, but inaudible to any of the Lanai. "Rey, that's the lesson. ..They can - they do."  
  
A realisation.*He can't punish them. _He can check, but he can't punish._  
  
What made them obey..?  
  
\---  
  
"Fear," said Luke, when they had returned home and Rey had asked. "And shame. Not of what I might do to them, but of their situation."  
He stirred his porg-stew dinner.  
"All of this frantic activity and hierarchy and petty feuding is about distracting themselves from certain realisations."

"I know," said Rey. She'd been figuring that out, gradually on Jakku, since her mid-teens.  
  
"Yes, you know. I don't need to tell you that, beneath everything, they know, and their fathers knew, and their forefathers before them knew, that they're trapped in a tiny place. Death - annihilation, even - could arrive without warning at any time: from pirates, slavers, colonisers, and that's before even the First Order.."  
  
"They're trying not to feel as if they're nothing, nowhere," said Rey.  
  
"Yes. What's more, they have no contact with or protection from that larger world except through me. Deep down, they know they're ignorant; they're deeply ignorant. It distresses them."  
  
Rey felt a sudden need to avoid his gaze. She nodded.  
  
"My aunt and uncle were much the same way.." Luke sighed.  
  
A lull in the conversation before Rey felt ready to meet his eyes again. "But why won't you talk to Neuva's husband?" she asked. "..They're - not Freve and Alcida, but the others - they're so trusting of you."  
  
"Trusting? Ha. They blame me for all of their problems. Secretly, of course. Unspeakably."  
  
"How would you know, without seeing with the Force?"  
  
"They explicitly forbid the slander of a Jedi. Societies don't go out of their way to forbid things their members have no appetite for."  
  
_Now, think,_ he must be hinting, Rey thought. _What did the Jedi forbid?_ But she wouldn't let herself be distracted, and he could see it.  
  
"Neuva is one of a rare kind among the Lanai who value knowledge for knowledge's sake," he said. "Who is brave enough to really think about her place in the galaxy. So, her peers have always taken various things out on her inasmuch as they can: their resentment of the Jedi, for instance; their resentment of their own husbands and the burden of childbirth - you know, she was able to get out of having children?"  
  
Rey nodded. "I don't understand why she just doesn't leave her husband."  
  
"I think she got tired of spending all of her time fishing," Luke said. "And milking the sirens. ..You saw that he's of the ugly mindset that he's doing her a favour," Luke said, scraping the last of the stew from his bowl, "But there's no one else in the village who will."  
  
"I just need to know whether she'll be okay. And Lanai like her."  
  
Luke nodded, eyes still inscrutably fixed on Rey. "Neuva's been the way she is - and been beaten - throughout her entire life. At this point, I don't think they're ever going to beat it out of her." He put his bowl down. "Of course, I can't speak for what's going on on other islands. But I tell the Lanai here - the women and the men, and the children - that they can talk to me; that they can ask me questions always - and that, if anyone wants to, they should be allowed."  
  
_But will that work?_ Rey thought, but didn't say.  
  
"As long as I'm alive, I'll do that; anyway," Luke added. "As long as the Jedi texts don't rot into the sea."  
  
At the sight of her sudden pale, the bitter edge left his voice. "Hey .. Hey. It'll be okay, in the end. And at least _you're_ not stuck here not knowing what you're doing." He smiled warmly, and reached forward to take her empty bowl away. "Unless you'd like to be a hermit, too?"  


**Author's Note:**

> "Ground and centre; do it child, if you'd tame that talent wild. Girl, you learned it in your youth: life's not fair, and that's the truth."


End file.
